I’m tired of hearing women apologize as a preface to our truth-telling: we bury our gleaming hard-won insights, cover them in ash. I’m tired of watching girls grow up with slumped shoulders, arms crossed over chests, inured against criticism but also against praise or love.

Women armored & women shrinking are rampant here: and it's no wonder.

​I know.

When I open my mouth at a recent poetry reading to speak about girls and pleasure {the first pleasure I knew as a girl of eating dirt, cackling with my sisters in a green rustling grove} my voice wavers, trembles.​In the moment, I feel surprised and embarrassed. After all, I’ve cultivated my performance skills as a poet. I’ve taken voice lessons, practiced countless creative embodiment and breathing practices, felt in my own body how emotion can flow through my words and channel healing energies—and felt the emotional impact in others, who’ve shared how they’ve been changed by experiencing my poetry this way. And, I’m about to lead a women’s retreat on this confident embodiment—this shining, vulnerable brilliance—at the Summer Solstice.

And yet, here I am, trembling.

After the reading, I duck out quickly. I’m afraid. Not of censure or disagreement, but of silence. That all I’d thought I’d won in this realm of confidence, in becoming a truth-telling woman, a badass seeress, has been lost. That my words were immediately forgotten, like so many women’s words before mine.

But soon afterwards, sitting in compassion for myself, I remember: it’s no wonder.

The ash women bury ourselves in—the apologies, the slumped shoulders, the silence—is the ash from the fires that burnt our foremothers. The trembling we feel is not a personal weakness, but memories in the underground of our psyche: of exile, persecution, betrayal, mockery.

When we speak at all, but especially when we speak from a deep emotional place, especially when we speak about violence perpetrated against women, or about the sovereignty of women’s pleasure or sexuality, or about any injustice we see, these memories get activated.

This trembling is older than you and me. It pulses in the tangled, constricted, shameful, roots of patriarchal conformity. As soon as we are conscious of the source of this quaking fear, we are no longer powerless against it.

I see that in one performance I may have immense confidence, and then when I open into a new layer of discovery, my voice may tremble. This is healthy: it’s a spiral, a deepening. Each time round, I gather new insights about my own voice & place.

When women open our mouths to speak, we open out into this spiral stream of energy that precedes us, and that will go on flowing long after we’re gone. We can harness our trembling as an undulation of freedom, a discomfort that nevertheless unlocks the voices from our throats. If the voice cracks, so be it. May it shake the ash from our beautiful lips.

In the midst of these new layers of initiation, I’m more excited than ever about VOICE, the next in the Creative Power Retreat series. One word to describe what we’ll be learning about together is “performance” of our writing, but what we’re really practicing is how to call forth our unfettered selves, our sovereign cells, from where they’ve been awaiting a voice. How to embody our deepest knowing, without apology, and to offer our creative voices in the spirit of a gift. The retreat will be a mix of guided visualization, writing, movement to express emotional energies, and ritual. In a supportive circle of sisters, you’ll discover the symbiotic relationship between your physical voice + body and your internal creative voice, how the two can nourish and reflect each other, and be offered as an elixir to our thirsty world.​

We do not do this alone. We do not do this without the world, which listens in its turn as we tell our stories back to it. The world does not see that we are 'other,' that we have made ourselves separate. It sees only the dog-violet, hears the clattering fall of winter rock, feels a woman's hands on the bark of a tree. The world is listening to you; you are in this world and of it and it is in and of you and wherever you go you carry this gift with you. Be the power of the land speaking. Pass the gift on.-Sharon Blackie

In the brilliant light of the summer solstice, we will learn to source confidence and clarity from our connection with the natural world, so we may discover what roars inside our trembling. We'll practice speaking the words we've written with our whole bodies, allowing emotional energy to flow through us freely. This roar we discover may be lioness-loud, but it also may be like the rush of a river, or the slow crescendo of stars rising in the twilight sky. I cannot wait to lean in close, to hear your voice.